What I write after Joe and Henry go to bed

Two days before it was scheduled to be shut down, I took Henry to the St. Pete Pier so we could bid farewell to our favorite ailing tourist attraction.

Like most Bay area residents, I’ve known for years that this old landmark would soon be demolished. I also knew that once I had my son I would regret having not made memories with him on the old pier before a slick new pier one day opens in its place.

The fate of the Pier has become a hotly contested subject. I refuse to discuss the pros and cons of its replacement design, The Lens, out of sheer exhaustion. I’m tired of hearing about it. When it comes to CHANGE I’m as much a fan of progress as I am a curmudgeon, so I’ll refrain from offering what would likely be an uneducated opinion.

However, this fact remains true: the Pier’s infrastructure is falling apart, its concrete pilings, if left alone, would crumble into the bay. Studies revealed 10 years ago that the aging destination with its smattering of kitschy gift shops and empty restaurants wouldn’t survive another 20 years of saltwater erosion, never mind an impending economic blow.

When this news became public fodder in 2010, I added the Pier to my biking route. When Henry arrived in 2011, I added it to my running route. Knowing it would close before he’d be old enough to remember it, I decided to take him there often – always by foot or by bike.

Save for a handful of brooding old men drinking coffee and reading the paper, the food court inside the Pier’s dated building was usually vacant in the afternoon. Often it looked like Henry and I were the only people to order an ice cream cone for hours. In order to get the attention of the proprietor of the ice cream stand, I’d have to rap on the freezer doors and shout, “Yoo hoo! Anyone here?”

I once caught the guy asleep in a chair.

I wondered which was crumbling faster: the Pier’s infrastructure or its business.

Before I had Henry I was impatient with the world, critical of myself and sometimes of others.

I thought stay-at-home moms had it easy. Worse yet, I thought they were devoid of interests beyond the confines of motherhood. I pictured them schlepping kids from Gymboree class to play dates, dressed in yoga pants and a pained smile. I pictured them chained to the kitchen, the SUV, the laundry basket and the obligatory spin class. I pictured them dutifully scheduling time for mommy pep rallies that celebrate the pleasantries of breastfeeding, cloth diapering, baby wearing and holistic nutrition. (Dear Earth Mamas: I see nothing wrong with these things. As topics of discussion, however, I find them boring.)

I thought I’d lose my identity as a stay-at-home-mom. I thought I’d compromise my self-worth and freedom. I thought I’d be resentful of my husband and pissed at myself for having failed at being a working mother: the ultimate wonder woman. I thought I’d be considered a disgrace to the radical feminists who came before me and a quitter to the overachieving, have-it-all multitaskers of my generation.

Leaving my job at the newspaper would mean I’d dropped a significant ball in the heroic juggling act that is regularly executed by the modern working mother. I’d be forced to rethink everything I thought I’d do or wouldn’t do as a parent, as if you really know these things before you bring a tiny, demanding, Bambi-eyed being into this world.

I was wrong about working mothers AND stay-at-home mothers. (As an aside, I was right about yoga pants.)

Two of my closest girlfriends are pregnant right now, both of them due around the same time: late May/early June.

You already know one of them – my best friend Ro. And guess what? Her baby girl (Mia) is due on Henry’s BIRTHDAY: June 5. How’s that for timing?

It’s killing me to not be in New York right now. The last time I saw Ro she was 48 hours pregnant (I’m exaggerating) and supervising my kid at a park while my father and I went about the serious task of testing climbing the park’s playground equipment. Even then it was obvious she exhibited better parenting skills than myself.

Her baby shower is the day before St. Anthony’s Triathlon, thus I am unable to attend. ANOTHER MAJOR BUMMER. Consequently, it is possible that my best friend will fully gestate and I will never see her baby bump in person. UNFATHOMABLE. Fifteen years ago, when I filled three pages in her high school yearbook, I never imagined we’d BARGAIN SHOP without each other much less give birth to babies on opposite ends of the Eastern seaboard. Kvetching over the phone about the marvelousness and shiteousness of pregnancy is not the same as seeing it happen before your eyes. I’ll never get to feel Baby Mia kick Ro in the ribs – at least not in utero anyway.

Ah. But such is life. I signed up for this when I left Buffalo nine years ago. (NINE YEARS AGO?! WHAT?) After a decade away from home your absence no longer goes missed. It simply becomes a matter of fact. You miss Christmases. You miss birthdays. You miss pregnancies. You miss babies being born.

When Henry was an infant he went through a ghost phase. And by ghost phase I mean he saw ghosts (ie: waved at Nothing, smiled at Nothing and acknowledged the presence of Nothing in a way that was both unsettling and mystical to his reasonable parents.)

This phase lasted from about nine to 12 months of age. It began one morning when I waltzed plodded bright bleary-eyed into Henry’s room and spotted him staring into space, smiling and blah-blah-blahing at a very specific Nothing in the corner of his room.

“Good morning Henry,” I said.

No reaction. He was too preoccupied with the Thing I Could Not See to pay me any mind.

For three whole minutes my perfectly rowdy baby failed to whine, coo or so much as nod in my direction. Although I was invisible, the Thing I Could Not See remained perfectly in focus.

I stared at the Nothingness he was staring at.

What on earth was he looking at? Or better yet, WHO was he looking at?

“Henry? Yoo hoo? Good morning,” I sang croaked.

It took some effort to divert his attention. When he finally did turn to face me he gave a little goodbye wave to the apparition in his room.

“Sweetheart, did you see something over there?”

He smiled smugly as if to say YOU DUMB ADULT. YOUR EYES ARE TOO OLD TO SEE WHAT I SEE. Returning to his usual helpless state, he threw his arms in the air and grunted – the universal baby sign for GET ME OUT OF MY CRIB DAMMIT.

We dressed in warm clothes. We went on a picnic. We picked up our Hot Mama’s of St. Pete Co-op basket. We played kickball. We made a sweet organic salad using fixin’s from our basket. We tried to set up a trampoline, but ended up bouncing around the yard instead. We got excited when Joe came home. We played with a strange, creepy baby doll from the 1960s. We fell asleep happy.

I’m at the grocery store, standing in the produce department. An old Italian woman in a babooshka approaches my cart. She presses her face so close to Henry’s face that for a second his curious mug is eclipsed by her curious mug.

“He is a bootiful,” she says.

“Thank you,” I say.

“His face, it is a bootiful!”

“Thank you,” I say again.

“He is the only one?”

“Yes,” I reply. “He is my only one.”

“He is a so bootiful you could a make a thousand of him.”

I laugh, picturing a thousand Henrys.

“One day,” I say. “I might make another one of him. A thousand seems excessive.”

She kisses him on the top of his head, oblivious to my sarcasm and shuffles away to the cheese section. “Ciao ciao,” she says, her voice carrying over the clang of carts and drone of adult contemporary music.

Fifteen percent of the time I suck at being a mom. I do things other moms would find deplorable.

I lie to the pediatrician about how often I give my child his vitamin D supplement. (That would be never. We spend our days outside synthesizing Florida’s natural abundance of the vitamin.)

Also: I tend to wake up in a surly mood, not because I hate mornings, but because I hate 6 a.m. mornings. Most people think I’m bubbly. At 6 a.m. I’m as flat as an old can of root beer. I trudge into Henry’s room like a mom zombie. I close the door behind me and crawl under a blanket on his couch, during which time Henry tears through his toys, upends his collection of Legos, rips his clothes out of his bottom dresser drawer and squawks like an angry bird. This is not an ideal situation. If I’m lucky I can get away with closing my eyes for 10 minutes. If I’m unlucky, as I was Wednesday morning, I’m roused from my 6 a.m. coma via plastic truck to the face. For those of you who noticed, this was how I acquired the small gash on the bridge of my nose.

I’m a natural night owl. This doesn’t mix well with motherhood. Still, I’ve found ways to persevere.

Now that we’ve removed the front rail from Henry’s crib, I can easily crawl inside to catch a few minutes of shut-eye before his squawking reaches headache decibels. Last week I fell asleep in the crib while Henry gutted his bookshelf. When Joe got up for work he glanced at the baby monitor and saw footage of his wife curled up like a big galoot under a monkey blanket.

I’m not an ace mom. The first time I caught my kid eating dog food I made him rinse his mouth out with water. The second, third and fourth times I let him decide whether or not Kibble was palatable.

… along the water at Fort De Soto Park. It was beautiful and exhausting. I ate a lot of chocolate donuts. Joe built a fire using scrap wood from our unruly Brazilian Pepper tree. Hank ate a lot of dirt; chased dogs, squirrels, trucks and little girls on the playground. We woke up each morning in time to watch the sun rise over the Gulf of Mexico. Spending two nights in a tent with an 18-month-old and a snoring, farting pug will certainly make you appreciate your uncomfortable queen-sized bed and busted box spring.

It’s the day before Thanksgiving and I’ve got about 15 minutes until Henry wakes up, so let’s see what I can do with it.

Really, there’s too much to say. There’s always too much to say, so I’ll do what I always do and thank the higher powers and the lower powers and the super powers and the not-so-super powers for everyone and everything that makes life so beautiful, so raw and so fun.

Since this window is brief, I’ll focus on one thing, a recent development.

My son has started to give me kisses. Nothing lifts me like this does. Nothing. When he sees me from across a room, he’ll give me this look. It’s a cross between What Can I Break and What Can I Climb. If I’m perceptive enough to catch him in the middle of these two thoughts, I’ll throw my arms open and he’ll spring into my embrace, landing at my chest like a wild animal returning to its mother after a long hunt. Sometimes he turns his face to mine and plants a slobbery kiss on my chin, or my cheeks, or my forehead, or my glasses. Sometimes he’ll just stand there waiting for me to kiss him. This rare exhibit of patience astounds me.

I kissed a lot of boys in my day, but nothing prepared me for the joy of being kissed by my 18-month-old son. Joy is an understatement. It’s surreal actually. When you take the time to live in it, the heaviness and the lightness of the moment can spin you around. It’s essentially a flash, a spark in your day, and the more he does it the more you take it for granted.

It’s one of those feelings that as a writer I’ll never accurately describe. It puts into perspective the things that matter and the things that don’t. It wipes away the difficulties of motherhood. It conjures up in you the hopefulness of youth, the wisdom of adulthood, the profound sense of love that fills a body with warmth and gratitude. So much gratitude.

Oddities

Reading material

Me.

Joe.

Henry.

Chip.

Buzzy.

Why Lance?

This blog is named after my old friend Sarah's manifestation of a dreamy Wyoming cowboy named Lance, because the word blog sounds like something that comes out of a person's nose.

About me

I'm a journalist who spends my Mondays through Fridays writing other people's stories, a chronic procrastinator who needs structure. I once quit my job to write a book and like most writers, I made up excuses why I couldn't keep at it.

My boyfriendfiancé husband Joe likes to sleep in late on the weekends, but since we have a kid now that happens less than he'd like.

Before Henry and Chip, I used to spend my mornings browsing celebrity tabloid websites while our dog snored under the covers. Now I hide my computer in spots my feral children can't reach because everything I own is now broken, stained or peed on.

I created Lance in an attempt to better spend my free time. I thought it might jump start a second attempt at writing a novel.

It hasn't. And my free time is gone.

But I'm still here writing.

I'm 262728293031 323334 35 and I've yet to get caught up in something else, which is kind of a big deal for a chronic procrastinator.